RAM Sp Issue OPERTO F Roboethics

Springer Handbook of Robotics, 2008

Law, Innovation and Technology, 2011

Alternate Routes, 2020

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Clearly, technical and scientific progress and moral progress do not necessarily go hand in hand. Therefore, this article encourages reflection on the new ethical challenges posed by such developments and, in particular, by robotics, a field that has developed greatly in recent decades and that has led to possibilities unimaginable until recently. Thus, the author examines here the so-called roboethics, its content, the specific fields it addresses -such as social relations and moral agency of robots-, as well as the different approaches and views on these issues.

In considering how to best deploy robotic systems in public and private sectors, we must consider what individuals will expect from the robots with which they interact. Public awareness of robotics—as both military machines and domestic helpers—emerges out of a braided stream composed of science fiction and popular science. These two genres influence news media, government and corporate spending, and public expectations. In the Euro-American West, both science fiction and popular science are ambivalent about the military applications for robotics, and thus we can expect their readers to fear the dangers posed by advanced robotics while still eagerly anticipating the benefits to be accrued through them. The chief pop science authors in robotics and artificial intelligence have a decidedly apocalyptic bent and have thus been described as leaders in a social movement called "Apocalyptic AI." In one form or another, such authors look forward to a transcendent future in which machine life succeeds human life, thanks to the march of evolutionary progress. The apocalyptic promises of popular robotics presume that presently exponential growth in computing will continue indefinitely, producing a "Singularity." During the Singularity, technological progress will be so rapid that undreamt of changes will take place on earth, the most important of which will be the evolutionary succession of human beings by massively intelligent robots and the "uploading" of human consciousness into computer bodies. This supposedly inevitable transition into post-biological life looms across the entire scope of pop robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), and it is from beneath that shadow that all popular books engage the military and the ethics of warfare. Creating a just future will require that we transcend the apocalyptic discourse of pop science and establish an ethical approach to researching and deploying robots, one that emphasizes human rather than robot welfare; doing so will require the collaboration of social scientists, humanists, and scientists.

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction - HAI '19, 2019

This paper belongs to the area of roboethics and responsible robotics. It discusses the conceptual and practical separation of humans and robots in designing and implementing robots into realworld environments. We argue here that humans are often seen as a component that is only optional in design thinking, and in some cases even an obstacle to the success of robot performance. Such an approach may vary from viewing humans as a factor that does not belong to the robotics domain, through attempts to 'adjust' humans to robot requirements and to the overall replacement of humans with robots. Such separation or exclusion of humans poses serious ethical challenges, including the very exclusion of ethics from our thinking about robots.

Connection Science

The EPSRC principles of robotics make a number of commitments about the ontological status of robots such as that robots are Òjust toolsÓ or can give only Òan impression or real intelligenceÓ. This commentary proposes that this assumes, all too easily, that we know the boundary conditions of future robotics development, and argues that progress towards a more useful set of principles could begin by thinking carefully about the ontological status of robots. Whilst most robots are currently little more than tools, we are entering an era where there will be new kinds of entities that combine some of the properties of tools with psychological capacities that we had previously thought were reserved for complex biological organisms such as humans. The ontological status of robots might be best described as liminalÑneither living nor simply mechanical. There is also evidence that people will treat robots as more than just tools regardless of the extent to which their machine nature is transparent. Ethical principles need to be developed that recognize these ontological and psychological issues around the nature of robots and how they are perceived.

Philosophy & Technology, 2011

Roboethics is the recent offshoot of computer ethics that pays special attention to the alterations that need to be made to computer ethics when we give the computer mobility and a means to interact directly in the human environment. The closely related field of machine morality explores how ethical systems and behaviors may be programmed into social robotics applications. As robots move from the factory floor into our homes and work lives, they stand to change key aspects of the way our lives are lived. In order to be successful, these machines must be programmed with the ability to navigate the human life world without committing ethical faux pas or moral outrage. Thus, the roboethicist is tasked not only with critiquing the attempts of robots engineers to achieve the integration of these machines into our life world, but also, and more importantly, with suggesting means of achieving better results than what is presently on offer.